How SlimCast works.
The plumbing behind the promise. If you’d rather just use it, the manual is over here.
Five stages, one of them yours.
You run stage one. Everything after it happens on hardware SlimCast rents, wires, and destroys for you.
OBS encodes once
Your GPU’s built-in encoder compresses the stream a single time, in HEVC — the codec that fits the picture H.264 needs nearly twice the bitrate for. This is the only encode your PC ever does, whether you are streaming to one destination or six.
SRT carries it out
The stream leaves over SRT, a transport designed for unreliable networks, encrypted in flight. How it shrugs off a flaky connection gets its own section below.
A datacenter takes over
Your uplink terminates at a trusted relay on datacenter internet. From here on, nothing depends on your connection — the relay routes transcode work to a GPU and passes the rest straight through.
A GPU re-encodes per orientation
A cloud GPU rented for your session alone decodes your HEVC and encodes what your destinations require — one encode per orientation, shared by every platform in it. It handles video frames only, and never sees a stream key.
Independent delivery, per platform
Every destination gets its own delivery worker out of the relay. If one stalls or rejects, it reconnects alone — the others never skip a frame. That is why the dock can show you a different state per platform instead of one averaged light.
Why one stream is enough.
Traditional multistreaming multiplies your upload — every destination is one more full stream your connection has to push, and most home uplinks tap out at two. SlimCast inverts that: you send a single HEVC feed, and the multiplication happens on datacenter bandwidth. The requirement below is flat no matter how many destinations you run.
- 720p30
- 5 Mbps
- 720p60
- 6 Mbps
- 1080p60
- 9 Mbps
- 1440p60 · membership
- 16 Mbps
Measured upload, with SlimCast’s headroom reserve already included — a quarter of your connection stays free for your game and your calls. Measure during the hours you actually stream.
When your network misbehaves.
A speed test tells you almost nothing about streaming. What matters is what happens in the bad seconds — and this is what happens.
Re-request, don’t stall
TCP-based streaming (RTMP) halts everything behind one lost packet. SRT keeps rolling: the receiver notices a gap within milliseconds and asks for exactly that packet again.
A window sized to your route
At go-live, SlimCast measures the distance between you and your relay and sizes the retransmission buffer to about four round-trips. Most connections land near the lower bound — enough room to recover losses, never more delay than your route actually needs.
Measured, not guessed
The setup wizard pushes your real OBS output through the real streaming route for twelve seconds and sizes your settings from what arrived — including the loss it saw. A browser speed test cannot tell you any of that.
A full disconnect, survived
If OBS stops sending entirely, your platforms are fed a holding card rather than seeing the stream end, and the same session is held for 90 seconds. Come back inside it and you resume the same broadcast — no scene resets, no new stream.
The last mile, to each platform's taste.
- Twitch
Tuned landscape H.264 up to 8 Mbps — or your HEVC passed through untouched when Twitch has authorized your channel for it, which SlimCast detects against Twitch directly rather than assuming.
- YouTube
Your original HEVC passed through at source quality — zero generation loss. The one platform that can carry landscape and vertical at the same time.
- Kick
Tuned landscape H.264 up to 8 Mbps, delivered over RTMPS.
- +Any RTMP destination
TikTok, Rumble, Trovo, X or your own server — up to 5, in landscape or vertical. A vertical destination is composed from the 9:16 layout you build in SlimCrop.
Where your keys live.
A stream key lets anyone broadcast as you — handing one to a cloud service deserves scrutiny. SlimCast’s rule is simple: keys exist in one place, and the rented hardware doing the heavy lifting is not it.
- Encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM from the second you save them
- Decrypted only on SlimCast’s own trusted servers — never in your browser, never in the OBS plugin
- The rented GPU receives video frames and encode settings, never a credential
- Your uplink is encrypted in flight
- Each computer signs in with its own key, rotated automatically before it can expire
Rented by the stream.
No always-on servers with your name on them. A session exists between your Connect and your Disconnect — and only there.
Now the practical part.
Every feature of all three docks, step by step, with OBS open.